Will Deplatforming 8Chan Really Work?

History suggests that online racism is hard to keep down. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.

On the list of factors contributing to the rise of white-nationalist violence, the behavior of various internet platforms and service providers comes in… somewhere. It’s probably somewhere behind easy access to deadly firearms and the American right’s embrace of racist rhetoric, led by President Trump. Perhaps it’s ahead of Fox News, which has helped to normalize said rhetoric but whose audience skews older, and is mostly confined to the United States. Who knows where it ranks in comparison to the general media frenzy over mass shootings, which amplifies their impact and incentivizes future attacks, however unwittingly.

The internet — in particular, hate-strewn, extremist message boards such as 8chan and the infrastructure that supports them — has helped to connect, radicalize, and incubate mass shooters such as the 21-year-old man who killed at least 22 people at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas. He was the third terrorist this year to post a racist manifesto that ended up on 8chan, after the Christchurch mosque and Poway synagogue shooters. (8chan’s owner, Jim Watkins, claims the manifesto was first posted on Instagram, which Facebook disputes.) That’s a lot of blood on the hands of a single…